A Stag with a Full Set of Horns – A Pirmaral perhaps
Why Do We Ignore The Exercise at the Climax of The Tales? 1
Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson is Gurdjieff’s towering masterpiece. 2 He spent years writing and refining it as he watched students listen to it being read and he was assisted by the best editor of his century. It is a serious student’s primary source, something akin to The Bible of the Work. The Tales come to a climax with an exercise that Gurdjieff says will free our essence and destroy our hatred, our egoism, and the cause of all our abnormalities. It is, he says, the only way that the three-brained on Earth can have access to the becoming path, the second stream, evolution. He makes it clear that it is extremely important. Crucial. But after being in the Work for fifty years and reading The Tales several times, I never did the exercise. I never even considered doing it. I read it and turned the page without giving it a second thought.
I’m not alone in this. I have spoken with many students of the Fourth Way and only one of them has ever done the exercise. It is immediately dismissed, ignored, and forgotten.
Why?
Here’s a quick review of the exercise. At the very end of The Tales, the ABSOLUTE asks Beelzebub whether it is still possible to save the three-brained beings on Earth and to direct them into the becoming path.3 You may remember it as Hassein asking the question, but it isn’t, it is the ABSOLUTE. Gurdjieff makes it very clear that Beelzebub is in direct contact with the ABSOLUTE. Yes, it flies in the face of everything we know about the Universe and the Ray of Creation, but it’s fiction; we don’t need to understand the mechanics of the event, we need to understand what Gurdjieff is trying to tell us, which is that this exercise comes from a very high place and is extremely important, so pay attention.
To answer the ABSOLUTE, Beelzebub goes into a trance state and says:
‘The sole means now for the saving of the beings of the planet Earth would be to implant again into their presences a new organ, an organ like Kundabuffer, but this time of such properties that every one of these unfortunates, during the process of existence, should constantly sense and be cognizant of the inevitability of their own death as well as of the death of everyone upon whom their eyes or attention rests.
‘Only such a sensation and such a cognizance can now destroy the egoism completely crystalized in them that has swallowed up the whole of their Essence and also that tendency to hate others which flows from it – the tendency, namely, which engenders all those mutual relationships existing there, which serve as the chief cause of all their abnormalities unbecoming to three-brained beings and maleficent for them themselves and for the whole of the Universe.” 4
Just to clarify: Our egoism is completely crystalized in us. It has swallowed our essence and it causes our tendency to hate others. Our hatred currently gives birth to our relationships with other people and those relationships are the cause of all our abnormalities. Beelzebub describes an exercise that destroys the egoism, which frees our essence and destroys our hatred of others, which, in turn, frees up our relationships so that they no longer cause our abnormalities. It does all that. It is the only way to do it.
How could an exercise, presented by Gurdjieff in this manner, be ignored? What are the barriers between us and such a call to action? I came up with three simple barriers and one that is complex and far more troubling.
I’ll start with the simple ones, the first being the organ.
Gurdjieff uses the concept of an organ like Kundabuffer that would force everyone to do the exercise. The difficulty is that if the only way for us to be ‘saved’ is for everyone in the world to receive an organ that forces them to do the exercise, then one might as well ignore it and move on, since no such organ is on the way. That’s not the real world. So we turn the page and keep reading.
It makes sense to link this exercise to Kundabuffer, as I will discuss below, but it can distract us from the point Gurdjieff is making. The point isn’t the necessity of an organ or the sudden universal adoption of the practice; the point is the practice itself, and it is a practice for one person. Luckily Gurdjieff clarifies this in Life is Real, where he is speaking directly to us rather than using a fictional plot. He repeats the practice and does not mention a new organ or the need for everyone on earth to suddenly embrace the exercise.
‘Only the complete realization by a person of the inevitability of their own death can destroy those factors, implanted thanks to our abnormal life, of the expression of different aspects of our egoism, this cause of all evil in our common life.’ 5
There is no mention of an organ. It is talking about a realization by one person.
Gurdjieff ends the book with “The Addition”, which includes the exercise of picturing the inevitability of our death,6 calling it ‘the hidden thought introduced by Mr. Beelzebub himself into his concluding chord’,7 and he doesn’t mention a new organ.
The second barrier is thinking that the exercise is to picture your own death. It’s a problem because, as Gurdjieff says in “From the Author”, it is impossible to picture your own death, no matter how hard you try. 8 That makes it a very frustrating exercise, but that isn’t the exercise Gurdjieff gives us. The exercise is to sense and be cognizant of the inevitability of death. We can’t picture our own or anyone’s death because it is something that will happen in the future and we have no idea how it will play out. The exercise isn’t to pull an image out of our ignorance (or our hopes and fears), it is to sense and be cognizant of something that we are carrying with us today. Every one of us is born with the inevitability of death and it is part of us at every moment. It isn’t something that rises up when we get old. Fears may rise up but the inevitability of death is exactly the same at birth, in childhood, and when we’re old and on hospice care.
It’s impossible to deny but easy to ignore. Gurdjieff tells us to sense and be cognizant of it constantly.
The next barrier may seem elaborately artificial or unimportant, but it has more impact than the first two. It is reading the last chapter of The Tales as if it were just another tale in the long line of tales. The last chapter is not another one of Beelzebub’s tales. It is different. It is the climax. Without understanding this, the importance of the practice is lost.
It’s easy to assume that this is not the sort of book that builds to a climax.
When I joined the Work, when older students spoke about The Tales they never said, ‘The end is amazing, it will knock your socks off.’
When I started reading, I found, as the title says, a series of tales, each with a beginning and an end. There was no indication that they were building toward a climax. If the early chapters divulged that The Tales would end with a verdict regarding our ability to make the leap from one stream to the other, I would have read each tale, each trip to Earth, with that in mind, tracking our progress toward that verdict.
But without that, when I reached the last chapter, I read it as if it were another tale. I didn’t notice the obvious changes that set this last chapter apart, that break the pattern and signal that we’ve moved beyond Beelzebub telling tales.
The last chapter opens with, ‘Beelzebub intended to say more, but…’ 9 Beelzebub intended to go on as usual, telling instructive tales to his student, Hassein, but something interrupts him. For hundreds of pages, he has described a series of tales that he formed and sequenced for a specific effect on his student. He knows how each tale will end before he starts to tell it. The last chapter moves immediately from carefully formed retrospective tales to an event that is happening in the present, described by an omniscient narrator.
The focus moves from the three-brained beings on Earth to a being who is from a planet in a different galaxy.
Throughout the book Beelzebub had carried Active Force, but that Force is now carried by an entourage that arrives to do something to Beelzebub. They know what they have come to do and he doesn’t. He is now carrying Passive, Receptive, Second Force.
Beelzebub moves from being the higher to being the lower. He had been teaching Hassein, which is clearly higher to lower. He had been studying and carrying out tasks with the three-brained beings on Earth, which is, again, higher to lower. An entourage arrives that includes a venerable archangel, other archangels, and angels from the level of the Four All-Quarters Maintainers of the Universe. Clearly higher than Earth and Mars. They initiate an event of cosmic proportion, higher than the telling of tales.
It is truly an event of cosmic proportion. The Karnak is lit up ‘by a pale blue something’, the entourage carries a casket that glows orange, they sing ‘The Hymn to Our Endlessness’ and it culminates with the ceremony of the horns, the beatification of Beelzebub, showing that his level of Reason is higher than that of the venerable archangel. 10
It’s a memorable event, but it isn’t the climax. It lays some important groundwork for the climax and it provides a very fitting culmination of Beelzebub’s centuries of service. Sort of the exclamation point at the end of the eleven hundred pages of activities.
There is also a fitting culmination of Ahoon’s life. He has a heartbreaking epiphany. He realizes that he has spent his life with a truly remarkable being and neither recognized the reality of his situation nor intensively did his Being Partkdold Duty. He falls prostrate and asks Beelzebub to pardon him. Beelzebub doesn’t. He looks at Ahoon with Essence-Grief and resignation. It is a sober exclamation point.11`
The culmination for Hassein is far more heartening. Hassein is given the opportunity to ask a question, and his response convinces Beelzebub that his teaching “had brought Hassein the desired results.” 12 In the chapter “Form and Sequence”, Beelzebub said that he took on Hassein’s education in order to prepare him to be able to perfect both higher being parts. 13 No small thing. Beelzebub being convinced that his tales had brought the desired results means that Hassein, unlike Ahoon, is on the becoming path.
That ties up the loose ends for the three main characters, but that’s not the climax. Gurdjieff didn’t write the book to let us know the true story of those three characters. They don’t exist. We do. The entire book is about us and the climax is about our loose ends.
The climax is the answer to a yes-no question and it is a work of art. Hassein asks Beelzebub how he would answer if a certain question were posed by the ALL-EMBRACING CREATOR ENDLESSNESS. 13
The ceremony of the horns laid the groundwork for this. Without establishing that Beelzebub’s Level of Being is higher than a venerable archangel, Hassein asking what Beelzebub would say if he was in direct contact with the ABSOLUTE would be a naïve hypothetical ‘What if?’ question: “Grandfather, what if you were talking to God…” Instead, given Beelzebub’s Level of Being, it reasonable for him to be in direct contact with the ABSOLUTE. To clarify that Beelzebub is talking to the ABSOLUTE, not Hassein, Gurdjieff describes Beelzebub going into a trance by having him rise suddenly and, ‘having stretched His right hand forward and His left hand back, he directed his vision somewhere afar off, and it seemed that with His sight He was, as it were, piercing the very depths of space’ and ‘something pale yellow began little by little to arise around Beelzebub and to envelop Him, and it was in no way possible to understand or to discern whence this something issued – whether it issued from Beelzebub himself or proceeded to Him from space from sources outside of him,’ and, ‘Finding Himself in these cosmic actualizations incomprehensible for all three-brained beings, Beelzebub” intoned in a loud and very penetrating voice, unusual for Him…’ 13
That’s not what happens when he speaks with Hassein. In fact, nothing like this trance state had happened in the preceding eleven hundred pages. Gurdjieff works hard to have us see that Beelzebub is not in a conversation with Hassein, he is in contact with the ABSOLUTE.
This is important because, if Beelzebub were answering a question posed by Hassein, then he, as the teacher, would have formulated an answer gauged to the readiness of his student. Beelzebub would carry Active Force, Hassein would carry Receptive or Passive Force, and the answer to the climactic yes-no question would be at the level of Reconciling Force, lower than Beelzebub, between Beelzebub’s wisdom and Hassein’s understanding. Instead, Beelzebub is answering an Active force that is higher than he is, at the level of a Reconciling Force between himself and the ABSOLUTE, at the highest level that could be drawn from Beelzebub by direct contact with The ABSOLUTE.
Gurdjieff has done everything he can to ensure that we see the importance of this moment. The question that the ABSOLUTE asks is: “Is it still possible to save the three-brained beings on Earth and to direct them into the becoming path” 14
It’s a yes-no question and the outcome of a ‘no’ answer is beyond just sobering. Think about it. A ‘no’ would mean that it is no longer possible for three-brained beings on earth, us, to wake up, balance our centers, or coat our higher bodies. The ‘becoming path’ would not be available to us. We would not be able to evolve. There would be no reason to do the Work.
‘Yes’, on the other hand, would mean that it is still possible to do the Work, balance our centers, coat our higher bodies, evolve.
That’s what is at stake. That is why Gurdjieff referenced Kundabuffer. It reminds us that the original implanting of an organ prevented us from seeing that the highest level our lives could achieve would be to feed the moon. That’s where we would be if the answer is ‘no’.
It boils down to a being who has studied our entire history from the birth of the moon through the parade of ancient civilizations to our current situation, a being who understands what we are and how we operate, speaking from the highest level he can reach, telling us our possibility of evolving. The being isn’t Beelzebub, it is Gurdjieff. This is the climax for us. Gurdjieff, the author, has taken the narration away from his fictional character and is speaking to us, giving us the answer to the most crucial question imaginable.
The answer isn’t a foregone conclusion. It’s hard to imagine a ‘Yes’. At Child’s Restaurant in New York at the end of the America chapter, Beelzebub looks around and says that human history has been an endless repetition of the same old thing. The impact of Ashiata Shiemash and other messengers had not survived. No bright spot, no light at the end of the tunnel, is described. And his response when Ahoon asks to be pardoned shows that there is no benefit in sugar-coating a situation, even when it causes Essence-Grief.
The answer that Berelzebub gives to the ABSOLUTE is,
‘Thou ALL and the ALLNESS of my wholeness!
‘The sole means now for the saving of the beings of the planet Earth would be to implant again into their presences a new organ, an organ like Kundabuffer, but this time of such properties that every one of these unfortunates, during the process of existence, should constantly sense and be cognizant of the inevitability of their own death as well as of the death of everyone upon whom their eyes or attention rests.’ 15
It is a very qualified ‘yes’. In fact, the answer isn’t a ‘yes’ with a qualifier; the answer is the qualifier. We can enter the second stream, join the becoming path, coat our higher bodies, only if we do a specific thing, and he describes that specific thing. And he describes it again in Life is Real.
If this last chapter is read as just another tale, it isn’t very impressive. It gets less attention these days than such chapters as ‘Purgatory’, ‘the Arch Preposterous’, ‘America’, ‘Form and Sequence’, and ‘Ashiata Shiemash’. But when seen as the climax, it transcends all of them as a verdict on whether we can even do the Work and it is a clear, specific, call to action.
So, yes, missing the fact that it is a climax is an immense barrier. Thinking that Gudjieff is asking us to wait for a new organ is a huge distraction. Picturing our death is impossible and it isn’t what is being asked of us. But none of these are very important compared to the next one. It seems that if we read The Tales’ last two paragraphs as simply a statement all alone on a piece of paper, without any reference to the first series or anything else, and we knew that it was authored by Gurdjieff, we would know that Gurdjieff was giving us an exercise that he saw as absolute necessity, and we would do it. But we don’t.
Why?
As I worked on this question, I discovered a barrier far deeper than all of this close analysis. I realized that a much larger barrier was my attitude toward the exercise itself. Here are four examples of this attitude:
Having one exercise that does everything – frees up essence, destroys egoism and hatred and all abnormalities, is not the Work. The Work isn’t as narrow and simple as having one grand task. The Work involves many tasks and exercises: self-observing, self-remembering, not identifying, unifying my centers, and more. To say that one single exercise will ‘save’ me is not the Work.
Second, although the results sound great, the way to accomplish them centers on fixing my relationships. I don’t do the Work to fix my relationships. That’s down at the level of social constructionism, secular humanism, self-help and pop psychology. I do the Work to deal with deeper, inner, things, and higher cosmic things. This exercise is shallow, mundane, and far from esoteric.
Third, the practice aims at destroying my tendency to hate. It’s aiming at a problem I don’t have. I don’t hate anyone. I can’t. Vegans don’t get enough protein to muster up hatred.
The last one is calling us a bunch of abnormal maleficent unfortunates. This sort of negative approach, like ‘dying in the street like a dog’, may have had some appeal in the 1930’s and 40’s, but not now. It’s outdated. The obligolnian strivings, coating a Kesjdan Body, and the digestion of impressions are far more appealing these days. No one is going to do an exercise because they’ve been called, ‘Merde of merde’.
No wonder I dismissed it and moved on. I, for some reason, think that I can pick and choose which of the things that Gurdjieff says come up to my standards, and I saw this exercise as pop psychology, narrow, shallow, mundane, unimpressive, outdated, negative, and, even though it comes from Gurdjieff, not the Work. Ouspensky says that the biggest obstacle to doing the Work is thinking that you don’t need it, and I didn’t need this practice.
It has dawned on me that I am more Ahoon than Hassein.
And there is one last barrier, clearly the main one for me, maybe for you. I started doing the exercise when I began to work on this paper, but even though I understand what the exercise is and that Gurdjieff says that it is extremely important, I doubt that I will continue doing it. For the same reason that I haven’t done it for these fifty years. Because I don’t want to. Because it is hard.
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As a final note, I do know one person in the Work, Steffan Soule, who has done it for years. Mrs. Bennett taught him the following exercise when he was 22, saying, “This exercise will help you to develop.”
“You breathe into the center of your chest and inwardly say ‘I am present here.’
“You look across the cafe or the public area and you notice a stranger for the first time, and you see the stranger while you take in another breath repeating ‘I am present here’ while sensing the center of the breast and becoming aware of feeling and of aim.
“Then you inwardly say: ‘HE HAS AN AIM; I HAVE AN AIM; AND WE ARE MOVING TOWARD OUR DEATHS.’ You say this while looking at the person.
“And after saying this, you remain present, you relax, and that is the end of the exercise.
“Do not do this with people you are with, but only with strangers in public, and you do not stare at anyone. You glance and casually notice them so as not to reveal you are doing an exercise. It is an inner, private exercise.”
Steffan said: “I am now 62 and I know that the repetition of this exercise over a long period has produced a specific kind of higher and refined energy for inner work.” Steffan teaches attention and the art of magic to help people develop their attention at www.steffansoule.com. He suggests seeing CS Nott’s book which completely reveals the facts about magic.
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Endnotes
1 ‘The Tales’ is the term used throughout this paper to refer to: G.I. Gurdjieff, Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson, EP Dutton & Co, 1950, pages 3 through 1183. This respectfully excludes chapters I and XLVIII
2 G.I. Gurdjieff, Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson, EP Dutton & Co, 1950
3 Ibid, page 1183
4 Ibid, page 1183
5 G.I. Gurdjieff, Life is Real, Only Then When “I Am”, Viking Arkana page 159
6 G.I. Gurdjieff, Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson, EP Dutton & Co, 1950, pages 1219 – 1238
7 Ibid, page 1189
8 Ibid, page 1221
9 Ibid, page 1173
10 Ibid, page 1173
11 Ibid page 1179
12 Ibid page 1181
13 Ibid page 1181
14 Ibid, page 1182
15 Ibid, page 1183